Ricin Man and His Trusty Dog, Moo Cow

By now you may have already heard the tale of the capture of Paul Kevin Curtis, an Elvis impersonator-turned-suspect for sending ricin to elected officials and who might also have believed he was being targeted for uncovering a refrigerator full of black market body parts.

But there’s always another side to every story and, the way Curtis tells it, it starts with a drive with a dog named Moo Cow.

At an appearance in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi on Friday, Curtis and his attorney fought back against Justice Department prosecutors’ motion to delay his preliminary and detention hearing, claiming they needed more time to uncover more evidence and build their case.

“It is abundantly clear that the Government is stalling and there is no justification for such tactics,” Curtis’ attorney, Christi R. McCoy, wrote in an official court filing.

McCoy’s four-page objection to the DOJ’s “motion to continue,” as it were, narrates the series of events that, in Curtis’ eyes, led up to his arrest on charges of sending threatening, ricin-laced envelopes to Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and President Barack Obama.

“On April 17, 2013, in the late afternoon, in Corinth, Mississippi, Paul Kevin Curtis was going about his business, stopping to put up his mail on the way out of his subdivision,” the story begins. “He was en route to the home of his former wife, where he intended to cook dinner for his family. In the car he had groceries and his young son’s pet dog, Moo Cow.”

HOH isn’t sure whether Curtis has more than one former spouse, but according to the sworn affidavit from an FBI agent, Curtis’ ex-wife as of 2007 reported him to the local police department as someone who was “extremely delusional” and “felt the government was spying on him with drones.” Maybe they’re on good terms again? Humans have the capacity to forgive.

Anyway, Curtis and Moo Cow’s adventure to the ex-missus’s house was not meant to be. As Curtis “approached his mailbox a number of vehicles swarmed around him, men with heavy duty weaponry, dressed in SWAT gear began yelling at him to stop, surrender, etc.”

After leaving him “handcuffed and shackled and … [for] some time standing in the road, he was driven to the FBI building in Oxford, Mississippi,” where he was then “handcuffed and chained to a chair.”

“The United States Government felt the evidence compelled them to literally invade Mr. Curtis’s subdivision, shackle him and force him to accompany them on a trip of more than 75 hours, chain him to a chair and interrogate him for hours, and then ask this Honorable Court to detain him without bond,” McCoy’s treatise continued. “The burden of proof is low but the magnitude of denying a person’s liberty without cause is great.”

The government’s evidence, laid out in FBI Special Agent Brandon M. Grant’s affidavit, traces Curtis’ poisoned letter to previous correspondences to Mississippi lawmakers on Capitol Hill, all bearing similar “verbiage” and references. Curtis has also left behind an Internet paper trail of blog posts and Facebook pages that echoes his conspiracy theories over his knowledge of top-secret for-sale body parts.

Also, Curtis performed his Elvis routine at a party once for his main target in the Senate: Wicker.